A personal blog owned by Zilko, who regularly writes about his life, or anything that comes up to his mind

Category Archives: Random Things

I would like to say: HAPPY NEW YEAR from Los Angeles!! Let us wish 2018 to be a great year for all of us!! 🙂

The year 2017 has been a big year for me, where I officially got my PhD degree and I also bought my own apartment. So yeah, I am grateful for 2017 and cannot wait for 2018 which hopefully is going to be even better!

Anyway, I started 2017 in Yogyakarta, Indonesia and now ended it in Los Angeles, California. The two places being fifteen time zones apart, this means officially 2017 beat 2015 in terms of my longest non-leap year ever, at 365 days and 15 hours!

So you know this Fall I was following the new Star Trek: Discovery and remarathoning Star Trek: Voyager. Of course I use Netflix for both series; and you know Netflix comes with the cool language options feature. Here are a couple about this feature which I found … amusing!

Star Trek in … Klingon and … Indonesian!!

So as you see in the photo above, using the feature we can watch Star Trek: Discovery dubbed in: Indonesian with subtitles in … Klingon! Lol 😆 .

I think this is a very nice touch of this new series! Though, speaking of the Klingon, this language is widely spoken in the series in the first place anyway (as the Klingons are portrayed as the antagonist). So somehow this feature choice, to me, becomes “less comical” and is actually more in line with the story line. I am not sure what is the original intention, though…

Speaking of the language, while Klingon is not available as a subtitle in the Star Trek: Voyager in Netflix, the Indonesian sub still is! I tried it once to see how the result would be. And here is a short clip of one of my most favorite quotes from Captain Kathryn Janeway from season 1:

To me, it sounds … very strange! Haha 😛 Somehow, perhaps I have associated the characters with their (original) voices so hearing them “speak” in another language does not make it feel “right” to me, haha.

The other day I was doing an evening jog for my cardio day in a park nearby my apartment when, all of a sudden, something struck the back of my head. And it was quite hard. Naturally, I screamed and tried to get rid of whatever that was (haha 😆 ); and then looked back to see what on earth was going on and who did that to me.

But I found nobody. There was noone behind me. But there was something alive there standing on the ground: an adult crow, haha 😆 . Yes, apparently I had just been struck by a crow! Lol 😆 .

Yeah, it was so weird and random how could happen. Obviously I had no idea why the crow hit me as I was not a crow whisperer. But thankfully I was fine and did not even get a single scratch out of it, haha 😆 .

Well, too bad I did not take a picture of the damn crow which I could have posted here, haha 😆

Candy Crush

Another totally random thought, here. An annoying mistake one could make while playing Candy Crush is to accidentally use the hard-earned gold bars for some purchases we do not intend to make. Unfortunately I have made this mistake multiple times 😣.

Speaking of Candy Crush, I am often annoyed lately by its loading problem. It frequently happens that my screen freezes while loading the game! Sometimes, it even gets stuck there and so I have to restart the game all over!

First of all, I do wish the year 2017 will bring us all happiness and all the good things!

Anyway, the year 2016 has been another great year to me. More than that, actually, it has been a BIG year where I finished (sort-of) my PhD and made a big life decision to move to the industry. Yes, a lot of stuffs were going on in 2016.

I started the year in Huatulco, Mexico and now I am ending it in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. The two places being 13 timezones apart, it means that so far, the year 2016 was my shortest ever leap year at only 365 days and 11 hours! Interestingly, though, despite being a leap year, actually my 2016 was shorter than my 2015 where I spent 365 days, 11 hours, and 30 minutes in the entire year!! Haha 😆

In recent years, everything has become easier online, including buying stuffs. While there are products which I still have some doubt in purchasing online (mostly fashion-related products; link to “Globe and Bag” in Bahasa Indonesia only), in general I do enjoy the practicality of online-shopping. Especially here in the Netherlands where most stores close at 5 or 6 PM (I still find this stupid, btw), online shopping becomes even more attractive.

One important aspect of online shopping is, of course, the delivery method. As of late, though, there are two delivery methods that have become my preferred options:

To deliver the products to my office address. Often, the delivery takes place during the weekday and the shop only states: “The package will be delivered between 9 AM and 5 PM on this date“. To me this is really annoying because (most of the time, as there might be a few exceptions, of course) I can’t afford allocating my entire working day just for waiting for the package. So, in this case, one solution would be to set the delivery address to my office. In this case, the postman could just drop the package at the logistic center (TU Delft has one) and the logistic center would inform me about the delivery; or in the case the postman needed my address, they could call me down to sign it.

Some delivery services in the Netherlands (PostNL, for instance) have a lot of pick up points in the country. I also like this option because I can choose where I would want to pick up my package.

I think either option is a much better one than having your package delivered to you at home but you are not at home so the postman decides to leave it at your neighbour’s or at specific places they choose (a random pick up point nearby, for instance). While the latter possibility might still be okay, the former is the worst, imo. Why? Well, because then when you can pick up the delivery depends a lot on your neighbour too! Once I had a package left at a small shop near where I lived (the shop owner was very nice, btw). The problem was, the shop only opened in the weekend and the owner did not live there. Consequently I had to wait a few days before I could get it!

This post is going to be somewhat closer to what I do for a living now, i.e. doing mathematics and crunching numbers 😆 . I have been thinking about writing this topic for awhile actually because I feel like it is quite relevant in daily life. It is just that I have not really got the time to even start writing a draft. Anyway, here it is now! 😀

***

Measurement

One of the most important utility of a measurement system is to make standardized comparison. For instance, 1 kg of oranges is heavier than 0.5 kg of oranges.

In mathematical notation, they are written as:
1 kg of oranges > 0.5 kg of oranges

It is clear and simple.

Well, except in real life, comparison is actually more complicated than that. For many people, what is represented by the sign “>” or “<” is not enough. We also want to measure the size of what is represented by those signs, i.e. how different are the two that are being compared. For instance, the follow-up question becomes: “How much more is 1 kg of oranges than 0.5 kg of oranges?”

And here is where things get more complicated. There are many different ways to measure such thing!

Example 1

For our simple case of oranges, I’ll give an example of two ways of measuring them with basic mathematical operations everyone has to learn in the early years of elementary school: addition (paired with subtraction) and multiplication (paired with division).

1 kg/0.5 kg = 2. Therefore, 1 kg of oranges is twice as much as 0.5 kg of oranges (weight-wise).

You see, two different ways of measuring oranges lead to two different statements about how much more 1 kg of oranges is than 0.5 kg of oranges.

In this example, one probably fails to see the significance of the two different measurement systems. This is because neither magnitude of difference is, somewhat, perceived as dramatic. The following example illustrates the difference better.

Example 2

During my Fall trip to India in October last year (yes, this post has sat in my draft for quite some time 😛 ), I posted the following photo on Instagram (and shared it on Facebook):

Notice what I put in the caption there. I deliberately chose to use multiplication (division) as a way to measure how much more each of us, as a foreigner, had to pay for the ticket than an Indian and not the simple addition (subtraction) method.

Why?

Well, because “having to pay 25 TIMES more” sounds more dramatic than “having to pay Rs 240 (approx. €3.40) more“.

Bottom Line

You see, different messages are conveyed with different measures. None of the way is wrong (well, under the circumstances that they are set up correctly of course). It is totally up to the user/analyst depending on what they want to measure. There is no one way of measure which can describe every single aspect of a comparison, of course. For our example 2, multiplication (divison) does not tell us how much more in Rupees we each had to pay (while addition (subtraction) does) and similarly, addition (subtraction) does not tell us the magnitude of Rs 240 (while multiplication (division) relatively does).

This means that we need to be critical when reading/seeing a number which is a result of a measurement system. The system is always set in a way with a certain purpose. We need to be able to see beyond the number, to get what the purpose is (and then, if we want to be proper and super critical, check if the measurement system is set correctly accordingly) because that way we are able to see why the author decides to measure things the way (s)he measures it. And then from there, we can decide if we agree with it or not 🙂 .